Goodbye my lover
by Jace Ama
Summary: Takes place a few months after Claire's funeral.
1. Chapter 1

Title: Goodbye my lover

Disclaimer: I don't own McLeod's Daughters.

Summary: Takes place a few months after Claire's funeral.

Note: Please read and review. This is the first FanFiction I've published. Unfortunately English isn't my first language, so don't hesitate to tell me any mistakes I made.

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He stepped over the little fence which separated the four graves from the rest of the land, and crouched next to the one that was on the left. He placed his hand on top of the gravestone and stroked over it wistfully.

The gravestone read:

_In loving memory_

_Claire Louise McLeod_

_1973 – 2003_

_Cherished Daughter_

_Beloved Sister_

_Loving Mother_

No mention of him. No "Loved Soulmate" or "Missed Lover" or anything like this. Not that he minded much. Everyone knew how much he loved her. All his friends and family had been witness to him breaking down after her death. As well as they all knew how much he missed her still. How much she had changed him. And how much he had cared for her. He didn't need to be part of the description on her gravestone. It didn't matter. Not in the way that nothing mattered to him after she had died, but in the way that he knew she loved him and he was sure that she had known how much he had loved her. That was enough.

He sighed. It wasn't easy these days. He still couldn't totally accept the fact that she was dead. He longed so much to see her again. To touch her and speak to her. To see her beautiful face when she laughed. To see her with Charlotte, her Baby.

When Tess had told him about seeing Claire's ghost he had been envious at first. But she wouldn't appear for him, no matter how much he wished for it to happen.

He dreamed about her a lot, almost every night. Tess would say he also had unfinished business with her, just like she had, and that's why he kept on dreaming about her. Maybe she was right. But he would rather see her in the same way Tess had and talk to her instead of feeling her presence and notice a moment later that it was just illusion.


	2. Dreams

Claire was lying beside him in bed facing him, eyes closed in an untroubled sleep. He turned to take her hand and watch her sleep. Everything was silent except of the steady sound of their breathing. He felt so calm and at peace seeing her with him that the impossibility of the scene didn't occur to him. He held her hand with his right one and with the other stroked over her cheek slightly as not to disturb her sleep. She was about to open her eyes when suddenly… he woke up. And in this short moment between sleep and wake he could have sworn she was really lying there in his arms, still breathing and about to wake up herself. Her soft scent filling his nose and when he concentrated enough he could almost see her piercing blue eyes as soon as she would open them. And when he opened his own eyes carefully, willing her to be there he was only met with the dark, the empty space next to him and a silence that weighted heavier than he could ever remember a silence between them when she was still alive.

That were the happy dreams where he would get up early and sit at the windows until the morning, staring unseeing in the dawn over to Drover's and think about the woman he had lost. The picture of them with Charlotte that they had taken in Melbourne which was usually standing on his bedside table was in his hands, ever so slightly tracing her face. His mind filled with memories and wishful thinking. He could be at Drover's now, in the bedroom they would have shared. Sitting at their window and looking over to Wilgul or Killarney, Claire in their bed behind him sleeping peacefully. He would be able to wake her any moment and look into her beautiful eyes.

And then there were the sad, disturbing and irritating dreams that haunted him as well. In them the motion of him lifting her face in the car that day and looking into her dead unseeing eyes repeated itself again and again. She stared in the distance and saw nothing. There was dried blood under her nose, her hair tousled and she wore the light blue sweater. That was all he could see just before he enveloped her in his arms and cried into her shoulder. The motion, lifting her face, seeing her eyes, seeing the blood, understanding and hugging her, mixed with the image of Tess running on the farm that day, with Charlotte in her arms both of them crying. And with these dreams when he awoke and turned on the light, just before the dark turned to the light, he saw her face in front of his eyes. His Claire, with the blue sweater, tousled hair, the blood, the piercing blue eyes seeing right through him and matching her clothes. And below one eye a single tear. Of sadness. Of regret. Of wishful thinking. And of love.

After that he couldn't sit still in his room and miss her even more by recalling her face, he had to get out of the house. So mostly he ended up behind the house, chopping wood. That was how Dave and Nick often found him in the early morning.


End file.
